


The Great Alcohol Escapade of the Etheral Moon, 1180

by Galaxy_Cerebri



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: "They said we can't buy it so let's make it", AU, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Breaking The Rules, Comedy, Comedy of Errors, Down the rabbit hole, It's Sylvain's fault, Jeralt lives, Underage Drinking, implied Marianne/Hilda, implied Sylvain/Felix, pre-established Claude/Byleth, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 18:24:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20451566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galaxy_Cerebri/pseuds/Galaxy_Cerebri
Summary: It was Sylvain’s fault. As all things kinda were. It started when he just wanted to get really drunk, except the merchants in the local town and at the market weren’t allowed to sell to students. So in a weird moment of exhaustion he suggested that ‘If they aren’t going to sell it to them, then we should just make their own’. Felix just sighed in that put upon way of his, (like he was annoyed by this entire thing but he really was mostly amused) and said he’d help if only to make sure Sylvaine didn’t blow himself up.Or, the reason why Seteth doesn't trust the Golden Deer students without supervision. No, Byleth doesn't count, anymore.





	The Great Alcohol Escapade of the Etheral Moon, 1180

It was Sylvain’s fault. As all things  _ kinda were _ . It started when he just wanted to get really drunk, except the merchants in the local town and at the market weren’t allowed to sell to students. So in a weird moment of exhaustion he suggested that ‘If they aren’t going to sell it to them, then we should just make their own’. Felix just sighed in that put upon way of his, (like he was annoyed by this entire thing but he really was mostly amused) and said he’d help if only to make sure Sylvaine didn’t blow himself up.

Then Claude and Hilda got involved because the former happened to overhear and was highly amused, while the latter also wanted to get drunk. They started with fermented rice wine, hidden out in an unused chapel at the back of Garreg Mach Monastery. They used a random recipe Claude had gotten  _ somehow _ (they were all a little scared to ask), and made slight changes as time went on in an attempt to figure out what actually worked and what didn’t.

Somehow, they didn’t get in trouble when they walked into class tipsy a few times. 

(Claude had sauntered up to the Professor just as they began the entire operation, the first week of classes for the month. While everyone else asked serious questions, or thought about what to say in case they got caught, Claude simply  _ walked up to her. _ And he asked, with the utmost confidence “If we were to, hypothetically speaking, start a wine distillery at the back of the monastery but got, hypothetically, caught… would you back us up?”

She merely looked at him with the driest expression possible (which was saying a lot coming from her), and replied “Hypothetically if you were drinking, I’d be extremely disappointed because it’s not healthy in the long term. However, if you were to hypothetically get caught, I would back you against Seteth from expulsion.”

The extreme disappointment was  _ brutal _ . Because disappointing the professor was like killing a baby deer.  _ Buuuuut _ , they really wanted to get drunk. So they forged on ahead.)

But then, Dorothea caught them sneaking about and walked in just as they all were raising ladles to take sips from their barrel.

(“ _ Please don’t tell Seteth _ ,” Sylvain begged. The mage gave him a look of disbelief before she shook her head, realising that, yes this was Sylvain. Sometimes he didn’t think things through.

“I’m not going to tell on you all,” she replied, “I want  _ in _ .”)

Then the operation expanded from just rice wine, to different kinds of alcohol as they branched off.

(“Have you considered mead?” Dorothea offered, sipping from the rice wine using the ladle she had stolen from Sylvain.

“None of us have a taste for it,” Felix explained bluntly. With a smirk, Dorothea walked out saying to leave it to her. A week later she came back with a terrified Bernadetta in her wake. Because apparently, Deers bond with vaguely illegal alcohol distillation  _ and _ heresy. Their professor really had the best class.)

And so the scheme, starting with Felix and Sylvain, quickly began to spread and encapsulate about half of the Golden Deer house. Each person had something to bring to the table. Sort of.

Sylvain and Claude could get recipes, Felix and Hilda hauled barrels and sacks of rice, Dorothea brought Bernadetta’s palate and life was good. 

Until they tried to expand.

See, it was easy to hide the drunkenness when it was just a handful of people. Claude could fake sobriety like the best of them, Hilda could lie through her teeth as long as it wasn’t to Seteth, Dorothea was moderate in her drinking and was only in for the thrill, Sylvain could pretend that it was from the inns in the local town after he flirted with a waitress or two and Felix didn’t drink. 

But Bernadetta had to taste and sample every single thing they made to make sure the taste was right and even when she spat out most of it, she still consumed a lot of alcohol. Meaning she got  _ very  _ drunk and had  _ killer  _ hangovers. For the most part they could hide it, since the Professor let Bernadetta have a few off days if her anxiety got very bad, but they couldn’t do that forever. So they had to bring in Lysithea. 

(Marianne couldn’t lie and while her healing spells were ultimately stronger, they didn’t need spells strong enough to close deadly wounds. Just really bad headaches and nausea. So Lysithea it was, much to Hilda’s disappointment.)

The feral genius (as they had taken to calling her ever since she downed an entire pot of tea to prove Lorenz wrong), had looked at the entire distillery, shook her head in dismay, rolled up her sleeves and set to work. Quickly, the entire thing got not only more efficient, but Bernadetta was healed from drunken stupors in a speedy fashion. 

Nevertheless, it still got out the Golden Deers knew how to get alcohol. And so they began distribution. Not to the younger students, mind you. Claude had immediately made them aware that the Professor’s backing was off the table if Lysithea or students under seventeen started drinking and Claude  _ would _ tell her. (Because if there was anything that the entire Academy could agree on, it was that Claude would do anything for the Professor. It was in the way that he looked at her, and the alcohol cohort - as they called themselves - all had great fun teasing him about it.

‘Time moves forward, what goes up must come down, and Claude would bend over backwards to please the Professor’ as Hilda liked to put it.)

But they had to get  _ something _ in return for doing this. Claude’s allowances from his grandfather could only do so much, even when Sylvain and Felix began chipping in to help pay for supplies (Hilda couldn’t help as her money was watched under a bit more scrutiny by her father). So they enlisted Ignatz.

He had reservations, of course, but he went along with it after a quick aside with Claude. (They didn’t ask, he didn’t tell.) So they started turning a profit for their scheme. Ignatz’s skills as a merchant’s son, even if he was training to be a Knight, were invaluable. He read between the lines and quickly found a good price for their services as the Officer Academy’s wine distributors. 

(At the start they lost money, but Ignatz quickly explained it was a vendor’s tactic. Lose stock and sell more quickly, but increase the price minimally to gain a profit and increase your consumer base. They all nodded, but Claude, Hilda, Dorothea and Lysithea were the only ones who actually understood what he was talking about.)

But then it quickly got out of hand.

Toward the end of the month, their sales hiked as the ball grew closer and passed them by. More students shuffled around drunk than ever before and Seteth had heard whispers from the knights of possible intruders sneaking into the unused chapel. They would have moved everything but their infrastructure was too heavy and some had to be bolted down to make sure it would all work. So they did the only thing they could do.

They burned the evidence.

Carrying ledgers that Ignatz used and every proof of purchase for their ingredients and supplies into the nearby forest, they set it all ablaze. 

Things were great for a while. 

Their Professor was part of the team that raided the unused chapel, finding empty barrels of wine and sacks waiting for them. She had feigned complete ignorance, not exactly shifting the investigation away from her students but rather making sure that there was no proof for them to find that it  _ was _ her students.

Then they were all called into Seteth’s office. (A student had seen them all fleeing the scene of the burning, having followed the Deer as they snuck off grounds in the dead of night. And none of them had realised.) Seteth yelled at them for a solid hour, having definitive proof that they were the ones sneaking into the unused chapel and in turn starting an underground brewery ring on campus.

He quickly turned his burning rage onto Byleth, fire in his eyes as he ripped into her for allowing her students to do something so tarnishing of the academy’s, and the monastery’s, reputation. They all stayed silent, cowed, heads bowed and more than a little terrified.

Dorothea quickly brought up a half truth, saying that they hadn’t planned for it to go so far. They had originally just started it for themselves. (Saint that she was, she didn’t let the original quartet take the fall on their own.) She quickly added that Bernadetta hadn’t realised the alcohol was being sold and Ignatz was involved solely because they had guilted him into it. Lysithea had simply been doing them a favour by helping with Bernie’s migraines, unaware that they had been wine induced in the process.

With that, she cleared the trio that had joined towards the end, and for the better. (Bernadetta was in the academy on thin ice, the Professor hadn’t said anything in particular other than a single aside to Claude that if she were to get her hands on Count Varley, she may possibly kill him. Coupled with Bernadetta’s constant fears that she was unmarriageable, useless and the like, it was fairly easy for them to see why the Professor felt that way.

Ignatz didn’t want to disappoint his family. He genuinely wanted to make them proud despite hating the circumstances he was in. While Lysithea was the youngest and was in the academy on a dispensation considering her age. She was under a magnifying glass near constantly to make sure her behaviour was immaculate, but they needed a healer and Marianne likely didn’t have the stomach for it, so they took a chance.)

Seteth let out the most exasperated sigh and looked at the Professor. “Why, exactly, shouldn’t I contact their parents and guardians, and let them know about this deplorable behaviour?”

They all tensed. While they knew the Professor had their back, they were still terrified as to what the woman would say.

“I mean…” she began, crossing an arm over her torso and raising the other to scratch at her chin in thought, “I read through the entire set of rules and regulations for the academy.”

They all stared at her as if she had grown a second head (the text was  _ massive _ , it would take even Lysithea a week and a half to get through and copious pushing because it was so  _ dull _ . Like watching paint dry) as she continued, “Technically, there isn’t a rule saying they couldn’t do what they did.”

“I’m sorry?” Seteth asked in disbelief.

“Specifically, there was no rule saying they couldn’t brew alcohol in the monastery. The only rule there is on drinking is that students shouldn’t do it. And yes, they distributed it, but really it was the other students choice to drink and you can’t blame them for other people’s decisions,” she explained in a blasé tone as her students tried to hold down smiles of relief, “At most, the only explicit rule they broke was regularly trespassing on a condemned area of the monastery. Everything else was a question of morality. If you were to punish them for alcohol consumption, you’d also have to punish essentially the entire student body. And I doubt the cardinals would like to hear  _ that. _ ”

Seteth asked for proof and the Professor left with a nod of determination. She came back not five minutes later with the Rules and Regulations of the Officer’s Academy and Garreg Mach Monastery. Having underlined the sections pertaining to trespassing and alcohol, she proved that there indeed was no mention to distilling of alcoholic products.

With another sigh, Seteth promptly kicked them all out of the office (likely to get a drink of his own) and sentenced them to stable duty for the rest of the year. The second his door swung closed, the freed students tackled their professor in a hug, letting out rounds of thank yous in the process.

“Just… try not to do something that insane again?” she asked them, but it was really a plea of desperation, “I can’t read that  _ tome _ one more time without pulling my hair out.”

“So you actually read it?” Claude asked in disbelief.

“Desperate times called for desperate measures.”

The entire thing went down as the Great Alcohol Escapade of the Ethereal Moon, 1180. That year’s cohort of Golden Deers were venerated as heroes for their sacrifice and it was spoken of for years to come in the hallowed halls of Garreg Mach Monastery. It was also why Seteth never trusted them without some form of supervision, and the supervision most certainly couldn’t be their professor.

**Author's Note:**

> I got to this chapter in game and I started screaming because I couldn't do it for EoLS and so I made this wholesome disaster of a fic. I'm not sorry. IT started off as a joke reference to this Korean movie I never got to watch called Makgeolli Girls, about a bunch of teenage girls who start making rice wine in their school dorms (iirc). I _need_ to watch this movie.
> 
> Join me on [my tumblr](https://laetusfabricor.tumblr.com/) wips, snippets, and more!
> 
> For art go to my [insta](https://www.instagram.com/laetus__art/)


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